The first contact with Michael van Praag occurred during the summer of 2015. The editors of Adest Magazine, the annual luxury magazine published by Adest Musica at the start of each New Year, had an interview with the KNVB president looming high on their wish list. Ewout Claassen, sousaphonist at Adest Musica and additionally a member of the Sponsoring Committee of the band, says: “We had learned that Michael van Praag, in addition to his work for the KNVB, UEFA and FIFA, is an avid sousaphone player. A celebrity in our own luxury magazine values it even more. These were the reasons for us to contact him. The occasion of the interview was in October 2015 at KNVW headquarters in Zeist. With a big smile, Claassen tells “Together with other interviewer Menno de Jong, who plays drums at Adest Musica and also is Sponsor Committee member, we had a very nice conversation with Michael van Praag. At the end of the event, we asked him whether he wanted to take a place in the Corps as a guest musician during a friendly international soccer match in the Amsterdam ArenA. He instantly gave his commitment.”.

Impact

Friday night March 25, Michael Van Praag will be among the ranks of Drum and Showband Adest Musica. The Corps will, prior to the friendly soccer match between the Netherlands and France, play the national anthems of both countries. Of course, van Praag will also rehearse several times with Adest Musica. Van Praag concludes “I think this is a huge honor! The Netherlands are, together with England, still the only countries in the world where the national anthems are being played by live orchestras. That always leaves a huge impression on the soccer players and the visiting association. I’m very much looking forward to the event!”.

Use cases

This is how we use copy.com (where our installed machines have Windows, Mac OS X and Linux on them) now:

Sync and share between our scanner VM, the various machines of my wife and me (using the different accounts for each user) and including off-site/in-cloud storage.
This holds for about 20 gigabytes of data and grows about 1.5-2 gigabytes per year.

Sync project documents between various business contacts and myself (the documents that aren’t part of versioning systems yet).
Not much data yet (100s of megabytes as most people tend to use DropBox for this even though Copy.com has the option of setting permissions)

Sync and share my BIN directory tree with tools where my own user has read/write permissions and other users have read-only permissions.
This holds for about 2 gigabytes of data.

Sync and share my installer directory (ISOs, MSIs, DMGs, etc) between my main Mac and Windows machines and various other ones.
This holds for about 40 gigabytes of data and grows faster than any of the others.

Dropbox doesn’t cut it for various reasons:

It sucks at long filenames (especially on Windows).

It won’t properly handle various encodings (like between Windows and Mac).

Often it hangs on local-sync (although copy.com also does that, but less often).